The spine of this entire Herald project was the sprawling landscape illustration where all of the colours, elements, motifs and textures are brought together into a form that represents Atlantic Canada. The concept came straight from Sam at Revolve and was something I was real excited about right out of the gate. It needed to be easily recognizable, fun and unique. Given our proximity to the ocean, I knew there was no better element to represent our part of Canada. I wanted waves, flow, a real “liquid landscape”.

After I got the colours and form in place, it was then a matter of populating our invented landscape with people, animals, trees, buildings, vehicles and whatever else to represent our part of the country along with the sections of the newspaper. I pulled a bunch of those out to show you in the images above.

Lots of hours planted into this thing, real proud of the final product. This wasn’t about me, or my portfolio, or making it “cool” … rather this represents the east coast of Canada which has been my home for most of my life. Certain amount of pride comes along with creating something for us Atlantic Canadians.

If you look at the Herald website and their branding materials you can see bits and pieces of this illustration sprinkled in there, but I’m not sure if this was ever used to it’s fullest capacity. Aw well, one of those things.

I love designing icons, always have. Back when I worked in the web industry designing sites (1998 – 2010) I often found myself designing custom icons of all kinds depending on the style and function of the site at hand. I always looked forward to taking a specific topic and whipping up a simple little illustration that symbolized it. Got me drawing, I like that.

Shown here are a pile of icons I designed recently for a local client, the largest newspaper in Atlantic Canada The Chronicle Herald. I teamed up with my friends at Revolve on this one, working closely with my pal Sam over there who was responsible for the art direction and selecting those great colours you see above. The group at the top was my personal cut list as I felt those icons depicted best the sections at hand, while the others were different variations and choices I developed along the way.

These icons were part of a much larger project for the Herald, and unfortunately the vast majority of these little guys didn’t make it into the final product. It happens, things get cut. BUT, I was so damn proud of these suckers that I had to post them. Like I said, I enjoy designing icons and I rarely get to do it these days. Plus, this is local. Been reading the Herald my entire life, real proud to have worked with them.

Watch the blog, I’ll be posting the second part of this project in the next few days.

Signalnoise in association with Film on Paper brings you Movie Poster Monday. We will be showcasing a movie poster to start every week, so be sure to check out future posts for some great art from cinema’s past.

After a long 2-week marathon working on completing my latest movie poster (TBA), I decided to take a day off and work on a fun little character portrait just for practise. I’ve always wanted to do a design based on my favourite swashbuckin’ starship captain, so now was the time. What started as a fun little illustration grew into my newest poster: THE SMUGGLER. This one is kind of inspired by posters and portraits from the old west

This was created using only 3 colours in hopes of someday doing a screenprint, but in all honesty I don’t know what the final destination of my Solo design will be given how massive the STAR WARS franchise is. Maybe I can do a limited run if I get some okay buzz and demand for this one. Not really sure, guess we’ll see.

“Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?”

EDIT: I played around with a couple of colour variants, added them above.

A proud day for Dartmouth! Check out this fake movie poster for CASEY JONES by my good pal Eric Miller of the Dartmouth Clothing Co. Eric is known around these parts has being the creative force behind is clothing company, but this time he stepped outside of his comfort zone to learn some new skills and create his first movie poster featuring that badass from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Being a tight-knit pack, most of the credits on this poster are Dartmouth-based. Just imagine if our pal Jason Eisener (HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN) directed this thing. I’d start camping outside the theatre right now.

I’ve been hanging out with Eric more and more these days, always super pumped to hear what he has on the go. He runs the Dartmouth Clothing Co. in much the same way I run Signalnoise … just do what you love, man. He showed up at my door 2 days ago with a 24×36 of this beast, melted my face clean off. Apparently he gave one to Jason himself last night and he “freaked the f*ck out”. He has a great write-up on his blog along with some reference shots and other goodies, so go have a look.

Signalnoise in association with Film on Paper brings you Movie Poster Monday. We will be showcasing a movie poster to start every week, so be sure to check out future posts for some great art from cinema’s past.

Here are a couple more things I worked on recently for Kevin Smith, which you might have seen at the merch table if you saw Kevin live during his UK/Ireland tour. Here we have the UK/Ireland tour poster as well as a t-shirt designed for Jason Mewes featuring his favorite saying, Half Half Whole.

Kevin and his team are always a pleasure to work with. Real nice people, enthusiastic about their shows and always positive feedback when I send them designs. Absolute dream client. I never get the impression I’m working for them, rather working along side them. That goes a long way, man.

I even had the pleasure of meeting Kevin and Scott Mosier when they were in Halifax a couple of weeks ago. Super nice guys, really love what they do. They invited me to hang out and watch the show from backstage. Amazing time.

If you get the chance to see Kevin and his friends speak live in your city, I highly recommend it.